The Amber Lee Boxed Set

  Aaron felt his throat constricting. He found it difficult to breathe and started to choke, though he continued swinging and hitting. From behind, Jackal came flying. She grabbed Amber by the legs and tugged her out from under Aaron, raking hard along her chest and spraying hot blood all over the ceiling and walls.

  Inside, Aaron was cut too. This was Amber. And they were passing her around like she was a Mountain Cougar trespassing on wolf turf. Like an enemy.

  Aaron stood, turned, and shoved Jackal away from Amber. Jackal hissed and snarled, swiping at Aaron’s face and cutting lines across his cheek. Aaron growled, but he didn’t have time to retaliate. A pair of claws gripped him by the throat from behind, constricting, and then a flower of pain opened up on his shoulder. He howled with rage and struck the face connected to the jaws embedded into his body again and again, but Amber’s grip was like a vice.

  It was Jackal who removed her from his shoulder, plunging her hands into Amber’s open muzzle—into the pit of sharp teeth—and forcing it apart long enough for Aaron to slip away. When he did, he too grabbed Amber’s jaw with one hand and held one of Amber’s wrists with the other. Amber flailed and stomped her feet as, with two werewolves holding her mouth open and immobilizing her hands, it became impossible for her to move.

  Twelve minutes, Aaron thought, that’s how long we have to last.

  But this fight wasn’t like the fight in the cellar. Tiny embers burst into existence around Amber, seeming to fall out of her very fur. Aaron and Jackal shared a look, and in that moment of perplexed confusion, their guards dropped. And their guards dropped just enough that when Amber’s body exploded into a blaze of fire, neither of them had even an instant to react.

  The pulse of kinetic force sent Jackal and Aaron sprawling to the floor, their ears ringing and their fur singed all over. When Aaron lifted his head, he saw only light. He felt the heat, though. It was all around, all encompassing, and when his eyes adjusted to the light he saw the source of the heat and light.

  Flames were licking the walls, devouring the supports, and crawling along the ceiling. The tips of Amber’s fur had developed a yellow glow and were flickering in an unseen wind, giving her body the impression that it was made of fire. A wolf of fire. He couldn’t help but exult in awe of the moment as his mind and instincts struggled with what they were seeing.

  Amber was, clearly, superior—so, was she Alpha? Should he submit to her?

  It was Jackal, springing back into action, which caused Aaron to shake his instincts off and get to his feet. Amber may have been the Alpha, but this wasn’t Amber. This was a beast which wanted only one thing; to kill and get away. And that wasn’t about to happen.

  Jackal struck first, sweeping Amber’s leg and knocking her to the ground. Aaron bounded over Amber’s body, took her arm, and dragged her across the burning living room, out the front door, and into the snow. When Amber tried to stand, Aaron dug his knee into her snout and sent her yipping back into the dirt.

  For a moment, he thought she was going to surrender. Her gaze came up to meet his and he saw beyond the mad glow of her eyes—he saw into the heart of the beast. What he saw in those eyes wasn’t murderous intent, but rather the frightened eyes of an animal which could smell danger, could sense evil—the evil inside of Amber—and wanted only to get away from it.

  And Aaron, Jackal, and even Amber, were in its way.

  Jackal came running out of the burning building, howling and roaring, and pounced onto Amber’s prone body. Aaron, knowing what he now knew, grabbed Jackal’s open clawed hand and, with great effort, forced the word “No” out of his misshapen mouth.

  Jackal resisted, stared at him with her glowing blue eyes, and cocked her head to the side. Aaron took Amber’s hand and dragged the wolf-beast further from the house, away from the fire, away from the danger. Jackal’s help made it easier to cover more ground, to make it deeper into the woods more quickly, but Amber’s resistance knew no bounds. She kicked, wailed, howled, the trees trembled as they passed, and the sky turned dark and thunderous in their wake.

  Amber’s power had returned to her and the wolf had begun to use it, but it didn’t know how to fight the darkness within itself. The thrashing, the fighting, the rebellion—Aaron had been looking at Amber’s wolf all wrong. Everyone had. The wolf wasn’t the enemy, here; the demon was. Amber couldn’t tell it was there because it had been hidden from her human side, but the wolf’s instincts were sharp. It knew evil was in there, and it expressed its fear—its revulsion—in the only way it knew how.

  When Amber’s energy burnt out and the resistance stopped, Aaron and Jackal let themselves fall to the snow. Clouds of steam billowed out of their snouts as their bodies healed in the cool air. Slowly each of the werewolves shrank into their human forms to continue the healing process and regain their strengths.

  It was Amber who sat up first and saw.

  There, in the ashy afterglow of dusk, a fire roared upward sending a column of smoke into the sky. Aaron propped himself up on his elbows and watched. Jackal did the same. Silence ruled for a minute—or maybe five, or six—until it was Amber who asked “What… happened?” knowing full well the answer to her question, even if she didn’t remember herself.

  “I made a mistake,” Aaron said.

  “You didn’t do this,” Amber said. She hadn’t turned to look at him yet. Her eyes were on the pillar of smoke taking away his hopes of spending some time alone with Amber in a natural setting.

  “I forgot about Jackal,” he said. “I should have known you would react to her the way I did when I first met her back in Vegas.”

  “It’s a wolf thing,” Jackal said. She hadn’t sat up. “We all do it. It’s an instinct to wanna immediately know our place in the pecking order. I should have thought about it too.”

  “You didn’t know what I did,” Aaron said.

  “Stop beating yourself up. Shit happened and that’s it.”

  “No,” Amber said. “Shit didn’t just happen. I did this. I burned down our cabin with all our… our stuff in it.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Aaron said.

  Amber stood, and the faint sunlight traced her delicate feminine curves with an orange glow. The wind picked up her copper hair and tugged at it. Despite everything, Aaron thought she had never in all the time they had known each other looked so beautiful. So full of fire and life. The red witch. My red witch.

  “It isn’t just that,” she said.

  Jackal propped herself up, too, and Aaron realized the three of them were wearing tattered clothes, ripped at the seams and barely holding together at all. None of them seemed to care. “What is it, then?” Jackal asked.

  But Amber didn’t answer the question. Aaron knew what the answer was because he had been Amber’s jailor for the past three weeks. He knew all too well how powerful the system keeping her magick side at bay was, and how much time and effort it had taken Frank and Damien to set it up in the first place. It was as much protection from Amber as it was protection from Acheris’s insidious clairvoyance; and now it was gone.

  Amber was whole, loose in the world, and their defenses were down.

  Chapter Eleven

  When Frank fled the burning cabin, he couldn’t tell right from left. Maybe it was the fire, which had come so spontaneously and so completely it was licking its way up the walls in the blink of an eye, or maybe it was the centuries old demon he had in his hands. He couldn’t say which, but one of those two things was responsible for his getting lost in the woods.

  He spun around in a circle, his heart beating hard in his chest, breath heavy on his mouth, eyes wide and alert. The pillar of smoke was there, rising high into the twilight, towering over the tops of the trees, so he knew where he was. At least, he knew where he was in relation to the cabin. Amber, Aaron, and Jackal were nowhere to be seen. Neither was Damien.

  “Fuck!” he said, “Damien!”

  Damien had the skull. Frank had seen him snatch it up before making his escape, but
if the demon wasn’t in Frank’s hands then it was in the skull; with Damien.

  “Damien!”

  His voice surged into the woods, snaking between trees and bushes, but the only reply was the crackle and roar of the fire and the drumming of his own heart.

  When the cold came at him like a wave of icy air Frank turned his face away and walked toward the fire, hoping he would find the others when he got there. Hoping the cars hadn’t also caught and gone up in balls of flames and light and smoke. That would have been the worst. No way was he walking all the way back to Raven’s Glen. But that was the least of his problems, wasn’t it?

  The ritual had failed. So much for keeping people out of the circle; they should have been trying to keep Amber in.

  “Frank?” The voice was faint, an echo on the wind, but Frank took it and hurried his pace.

  “Damien?” Frank said.

  “Over here!”

  He found Damien standing in a nearby copse, far enough from the burning cabin that the blaze was no longer a problem. The cars were visible from here, and they were also perfectly safe from the fire. That was something. But Damien didn’t look too great. His face was pale and almost had a kind of yellow hue to it; or maybe it was green. It was difficult to tell in this light. One thing was sure, though. The skull wasn’t in his hands.

  Frank hurried. “Where is it?” he asked. But by the time he reached Damien the question had answered itself.

  There, on the snow, laid the smashed up and cracked remains of an item that had served as a prison for a greater inhuman demonic spirit. Frank’s stomach twisted into a knot and his lips curled into a frown heavy with concern.

  “What the fuck?” Frank asked.

  “I was running with it and tripped over that root,” Damien said, “I’m sorry, man. I wasn’t looking.”

  The root was there, poking out of the snow. Smug. Happy with itself. Frank ran his hands through his hair and then over his cheeks. He knelt before the skull to assess the damage—yeah, it’s fucking fucked—and then just looked at it for a moment. He reached, with his left hand, to feel inside with his mind and felt… nothing.

  Nothing.

  “What is it?” Damien asked.

  “It’s gone,” Frank said.

  “Gone?”

  “Did I stutter? Yeah, it’s fucking gone.” Frank stood. His spine cracked. “We’re screwed.”

  “We aren’t screwed.”

  “Unless you’ve got a seven hundred year old demon in your pocket, then we’re screwed.”

  “You don’t know where it is?”

  “I had it in my hands when the house went up. Then I lost it.”

  Frank knew the ritual failsafe would have sent the demon back into the skull. It was supposed to do that if there were interruptions. But then, Damien knew that too, didn’t he? Frank had, of course, discussed the ritual with Damien before. Only Frank was needed to cast it, but he wanted to tell Damien the particulars just in case Frank couldn’t perform for whatever reason. Asking Damien to complete a black ritual was like asking a Care Bear to kill a baby fawn with a butter knife, but he had the magickal potential to pull it off if the circumstances were dire enough.

  He didn’t like the picture this situation painted. Damien had guilt written all over his face, and this time he couldn’t let it slide.

  “I need you to tell me if you did this on purpose,” Frank said.

  “What?” Damien asked, eyebrows going up.

  “You heard me.”

  “You think I did this? That I broke it?”

  “Stranger things have happened. What I want to know is why.”

  “I didn’t break it, Frank.”

  “You better not be bullshitting me, Damien. I’m really not in the mood.”

  Damien fell strangely silent. The wind sailed between them, frigid and sharp, as if it were drawn to the fire.

  “I didn’t do it,” Damien said. “And it’s really fucked up that you think I did.”

  “Prove it.”

  “What? How?”

  “Let me look into your mind. I’ll know the truth.”

  “I’m telling you what the truth is. You don’t need to look into my mind.”

  “Scared of what I’ll find in there?”

  Frank was pushing. He knew he was. But after what he had seen—the snake—and now the broken skull, he needed to push. If Damien was even the least bit infested by the demonic Frank would be able to find it, but only once he had gotten a rise out of the demon inside. Demons can’t resist being baited, but they’re also great liars. You had to catch them out in a lie to get them to react.

  “I’m not scared of what you’ll find in my head. I just don’t want you going in there,” Damien said. “You need to respect that.”

  “Right now my priority is figuring out where the fuck that demon went. It should have gone right back into the skull if the ritual failed, but lo and behold, the skull is smashed. Don’t you think that looks a little fucking suspicious, Damien?”

  “For God’s sake, Frank, I’m telling you the truth.”

  Frank reached out with his invisible senses anyway, groping around for a sliver of… anything. An emotion that hadn’t been there before, a blind spot in his soul, a stray thought that wasn’t his. Nothing. Frank came up short. If he had the demon’s power, as he’d had before, he would have been able to detect even the slightest bit of taint. But the demon was gone, now. Vanished. And with the reliquary destroyed they wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of imprisoning it in there again.

  But demons didn’t just vanish. Those things existed in a state of perpetual agony and pain. That’s why they took human hosts.

  The question wasn’t where had it gone, but into who?

  Chapter Twelve

  What do you do when you burn down the very place you had fled to in order to get away from people? You go back home. Back to where the people are. Because that’s the only choice you have. My place was close, empty, and warm. All our clothes were there, or at least, all of our clothes and stuff minus whatever Aaron had brought to the cabin.

  Going home was a better idea than going anywhere else for a number of reasons. I wasn’t the same person I had been the day I threw myself in the hole, but I could still feel the beast scratching at my skin from the inside. It wanted out. I could tell. But something had happened to placate it. I sensed a kind of… peace? No, it wasn’t peace. It was more like it had understood something, or something had satisfied it into placation.

  That was good enough for now. It meant I could go up to my room, have a shower, change, and sit on my own bed without fearing I might at any point lose my shit and tear the place apart.

  We had left my place in a hurry the day we decided it best to incarcerate me, so stepping back inside… I don’t know. I guess I thought everything would be the way it had been on the night we fled. Scratch marks on the walls, torn up carpets, an upturned couch. But then I remembered that Frank and Damien still lived here while I was gone.

  They had cleaned up.

  For me.

  Stepping into the house was like stepping into a wall of sadness and regret, of pain, of shame. I fled, as fast as I could, up the stairs and into my bedroom without saying a word. It wasn’t until I had finished having my shower, as I stood staring at my freckled reflection in the bathroom mirror, that I realized I had somehow become this weak thing; unable, or unwilling, to confront my own emotions. How could anyone live like this?

  Frank was the first to come up and see me. I opened the door to him and he crossed, silently, to the other side of the room. There he proceeded to crack a window open, pull a long, thin cigarette out of a small metal box, and smoke himself calm.

  “Nice to see you looking like a human again,” he said.

  “I have so many emails,” I said, “And Eliza… she’s probably been worried.”

  “I covered for you.”

  “You did?”

  “She called the house. I told her you were in V
egas with Aaron visiting his family and that you’d left your phone here.”

  “Who leaves their phone anywhere nowadays?”

  “You do. So if she asks, that’s your story.”

  One didn’t need to be a witch to know Frank’s nerves were on edge. He hadn’t turned to look at me since we got inside, and given that outside was dark there couldn’t have been much for him to look at.

  “What’s going on, Frank?” I asked.

  Frank exhaled a stream of smoke out the window. “To put it eloquently, we’re up shit creek without a paddle. The skull’s busted, the demon’s gone, and I have no idea where the fuck it is.”

  I didn’t know where to start. “Gone?”

  “Gone. As in, poof. One minute I had it in my hands, the next minute it was gone. The reliquary got damaged in transport.”

  “So your ritual…”

  “Didn’t work.”

  A moment of silence hung suspended in the air, accompanied by the hoot of a night owl. “Something tells me that isn’t the only thing on your mind,” I said.

  “There are other things, yes. But I want to focus on the main problem.”

  “You’re about to tell me a demon being AWOL isn’t the main problem?”

  He turned to look at me. “Not for the Red Witch, but you stopped being the Red Witch the moment our mistress of darkness decided to shuffle loose her mortal coil and leave us all hanging here.”

  “Don’t talk about her like that.” My heart thumped fast and the house trembled causing a trickle of dust to fall from the ceiling.

  Frank stared at the dust and blinked. “I didn’t mean to sound insensitive,” he said, “But no. A demon isn’t the main problem.”

  “So, what is?”

  “The main problem is your head.”

  “My… head?”

  Frank moved from the window and crossed to the foot of the bed, his lanky, skinny form towering above me. “Do you know what happens to people who suffer mental trauma?”

  “They break down?”

  “Exactly. Mental trauma is the same as physical trauma; it needs treatment. And now that you’re willing and able to listen to someone, you’re going to let me treat you. But that involves talking about things you’re not comfortable with.”